


Learning

by karanguni



Category: Hainish Cycle - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 19:29:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1097749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Envoy finally came to Estre, Sorve was waiting. Stammering, he asked Genly about the other worlds, the other stars, the other kinds of men. Sorve meant it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Learning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ellen_fremedon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/gifts).



He had grown up a grimly silent child, but that had never been unexpected of Sorve. Even in Kerm Land, where tempers ran short and shadows grew long, his was a difficult history. 

Esvans had done the best he could for Sorve. Though he was the son of a suicide and the son of a traitor, Sorve never grew up wanting for much. Estre had profited some with Therem's ascendecy to Prime Minster; in his absence the domain had fortified its boundaries and kept the inner hearths filled with the chatter of children. Sorve had been raised as one of many hearthsibs. His earliest memories were of skiing with family and friends along the Eastern territories and learning their histories. His later memories were of learning his own history.

When the Envoy finally came to Estre, Sorve was waiting. Stammering, he asked Genly Ai about the other worlds, the other stars, the other kinds of men. Sorve meant it.

* * *

Ai stayed. No one had expected him to, but he did, and Sorve became his pupil. His first lessons were awful; Ai was nothing like his other tutors. The Envoy was strange in every possible way. From the colour of his skin to his state of permanent kemmer, everything about Ai made Sorve nervous and uneasy. 

It took the study of Orgota to help Sorve regain some sense of balance. He had had some earlier training in the language from Esvans, but the lord was old and impatient with lessons. No one else in the Hearth spoke it well, and Esvans had been thinking of hiring a tutor from Erhenrang until Ai arrived and offered to include it in his lesson plans. 

'It is not an alien language,' Sorve objected at first. 'I could learn Orgata from any number of people in Karhide alone.'

'But it is a foreign language, which is ultimately what all alien languages are,' Ai replied. They were in Lord Esvans extensive personal library, where lords of Estre had been tutored - and bored - to death for generations. Ai brought to the table some old Orgota textbooks that Sorve had been using and laid one hand on them. 'Did you find these useful?'

'Not particularly,' Sorve admitted. 

'Fine,' Ai nodded, putting them away. He stood and walked to the shelves, browsed for a moment, then returned with a thin volume written entirely in Orgota. 'This is the official history of Orgoreyn as it is summarised for their textbooks,' Ai said, laying it in front of Sorve. 'We'll start from here instead.'

* * *

It took Sorve three hard years of study to become fluent in Orgota. Ai was an infuriatingly precise teacher, and lessons often spiralled into somewhat overwhelming discussions of linguistics that frustrated both student and teacher.

'There is a general system in Terran that has been commonly used by cultures within the Ekumen to describe linguistic features; no such equivalent exists here in Gethen,' Ai said one day after he and Sorve, who was now almost in tears of rage, had argued for over an hour on some small etymological difference between Orgota and Karhidish. 'It would have been useful in this discussion.' 

They had consulted books and shouted at each other in a wonderful debate. 'What's the point?' Sorve asked, exhausted and slumped atop a couch. 'Ultimately, the differences can be understood as historical.'

'It's easier to talk about them with a meta-language,' Ai said, reshelving the books that they had taken out nilly-willy before. 

'Isn't it easier still to use your mind speech?' Sorve asked lazily. 

Ai froze. Sorve looked at him. 'Am I incorrect? Did I say something wrong?' Even now, Sorve wasn't sure if Ai fully understood all the nuances of speaking Karhidish. For one, the Envoy spoke in largely the same way to Sorve as he did to any other member of the Hearth, even though Sorve was not yet fully an adult and therefore did not worry much about issues of _shifgrethor_. 

'No,' Ai said very slowly, as if composing himself. 'But mind speech isn't something that you use lightly, and not something that I am willing to teach you.' 

'Why not?' Sorve asked, unsure if he should feel insulted or patronised or neither. Or both, for that matter: Ai was sometimes oddly prideful, which was a ridiculous attitude to take when tutoring a child, or so Sorve thought.

'Putting aside the fact that not every person you encounter will be willing or even able to use it?' Ai asked, arch. 

'Putting that aside, yes, why not?' Sorve asked again, stubborn.

Ai looked at him, and Sorve thought he saw for a moment an expression on the envoy's bare face that he had never seen before: a brief flicker of fear. It passed though, and Ai spoke more politely to him, saying, 'What would be the point of language, then? Or of learning to communicate - or of learning anything at all?' 

* * *

In retrospect, Terran was the easier language to learn. Too many words in Orgota had cognates in Karhidish, which often made Sorve complacent. Terran, on the other hand, was entirely foreign. Learning a new word often felt like an act of unwrapping entire concepts that had been bound up into incredibly small nuggets of speech. 

Learning Terran pronouns, though an obvious exercise, was also the trickiest matter for Sorve. 

'I can't quite explain,' Sorve finally said to Ai one day in Karhidish, completely exasperated. Normally Ai enforced a strict language policy in their classroom - unless express clarification was needed, only the language being learnt was to be spoken - but Sorve felt his head throbbing and needed the reprieve. 'It's not what I'm comfortable _thinking_ of you as,' he said to Ai, trying to explain. 'When I use the words _he_ or _his_ , I feel like this study is a kemmerhouse. It doesn't feel natural,' there Sorve hesitated, and qualified, 'though I understand that it's my own biases at work.' He sighed, closing his eyes. 'I never thought my biases would make my head hurt like this.'

'Quite,' Ai said, also in Karhidish. 'In much the same way that I imagine that you wouldn't like to be called an _it_ in Terran, there isn't a word in Karhidish - or any Gethenian language for that matter - that expresses gender in a way that is familiar to me.'

'We should make up a word,' Sorve muttered. 'In both languages. In all languages.'

'It's been tried before,' Ai told him. 'It's never so much a problem of language as one of adoption, though.'

* * *

'The first mobile from a contacted planet doesn't normally emerge until a good number of generations have passed,' Ai said when Sorve finally told him what he planned to do. Sorve could tell that the envoy was surprised. 

'If you go,' Ai warned him, 'you won't be coming back to a Karhide that you remember. The jump from here to Earth will requiring you making stops at Hain and then again at Ellul along the way. Each jump will take the equivalent of 50 or so of your years. When you return - if you return at all - things will be different.'

Sorve thought about this for a while. 'How many languages are commonly spoken within the Ekumen?' he asked, eventually.

'Hundreds,' Ai said, a cold statement of fact that made Sorve feel very provincial. But then he added, more gently, 'Mobiles are generally only required to be fluent in four or five when they begin service. Mostly the learning happens as you go.'

'I only have three at the moment: Karhide, Orgota, and Terran. It wouldn't do any harm to stay until I have learned at least two more?'

Ai shrugged. 'It is all the same to us, in the end. What matters is that you learn them at all.'

* * *

After Sorve entered kemmer for the first time, Ai left Estre. 

'Where will you go?' Sorve demanded when Ai told him, unable to help but feel as though he were being abandoned somehow. 

'Nowhere on Gethen,' Ai told him. All of the envoy's things had been packed and loaded onto a power-sledge that was due to leave for Erhenrang the next day. Ai carried nothing on his person but a small pack, and nothing of his had been left behind in his rooms. 

The two of them were in Esvans' study. Ai had come to say goodbye. With what looked like great hesitance, he extended both hands to Sorve. Sorve took them between his own, solemnly. 

'Will you let me try something?' Ai said, unusually hesitant. 'Will you let me try to bespeak you?'

Sorve couldn't stop the shock from showing on his face. 'You said you were never going to teach me,' he said. 'We don't even know if I'm capable of hearing you.'

'But will you let me try?' Ai asked. 

Sorve looked down at their clasped hands. 'Yes.'

For a while, there was nothing. Then there was a voice in his head; not something heard so much as something felt. _Goodbye, Sorve._

Sorve blinked. 'Well, then,' he said, unsure of what the appropriate response should be. 'I am not sure whether to feel overwhelmed or unimpressed.'

Ai laughed, a startled noise. He let go of Sorve's hands and took a moment to recompose himself. 'You know, Sorve,' the envoy said, 'though you are in many ways Therem's son-'

Sorve cut him off with an upraised hand. 'I don't know what you were about to say,' he told Ai. 'But you have been my tutor for the long years of my adolescence, and my friend and my ally for almost as long. Let me speak frankly to you one last time. 

'You have taught me things about the Ekumen and given me a language in which to understand it without my ever having to leave Kerm Land. I feel, and I think you know, that I have a long journey ahead of me. I hope to meet many peoples, and see many places. But I hope to be my own person for my whole lifetime: to be Sorve Harth rem ir Estraven of Karhide, of Gethen. I have only just come of age. My shadow has been darkened before this day, not even though I am the son of Therem or the son of Arek, though I am certainly a child of both.'

Sorve took a deep breath. 'I hope to see you again one day, in your own world up there in the stars,' he told Ai.

Ai smiled. Whether he was sad or fulfilled was not Sorve's to say. 'Call me Genly,' he said at last, almost after Sorve had despaired of him saying anything at all.

'Genly,' Sorve said, warmly and in Terran; the tip of his tongue grazed the roof of his mouth and completed a consonant sound.


End file.
